Solicitor wants 25% of my personal injury compensation

BertTheRaccoon

Parking_Trouble wrote: »

I thought there were some published guidelines on what you get.

The JSB Guidelines exist, but you can only really apply them when you know the prognosis for the period of recovery.

Same goes for using caselaw.

it is rare now, in my opinion, that insurers give their claims staff a free reign on valuation on PI claims.

The tactic seems to be make pre-med offers of £1k. When that is rejected and medical evidence provided by the Claimant lawyer, the claim handler has to use a computer system to value the claim such as colossus. So there is generally a de-skilling of the claims staff as they are just trained on how to put the basic details from the med report into the computer and it then tells them how much to offer.

Quite often the offers are poor and the hands of the claim handler are tied and the case results in litigation.

I do sympathise with insurance claims staff. Due to the bean counters at the top of the pyramid, they chose to run claims departments in an under-resourced manner, end up with stupid backlogs, have the phones switched off so third party representatives can't even get through and then wonder why costs spiral with litigation, credit hire etc etc.

Clive_Woody

Crazy_Jamie wrote: »

The problem with this approach being that no solicitor is going to give a 'ball park valuation' of a broken leg without seeing a medical report and gathering the necessary evidence in terms of special damages, neither of which they will do unless they are officially instructed. Negotiating direct with the insurer on a personal injury claim is something that anybody should be very wary of because valuing injuries is a specialist area, but doing it when the injury is as serious as a broken leg is just a straight up terrible idea.

Merely a suggestion on how one could consider proceeding, which given the solicitors fees allows a margin of error of 25% on what could be achieved before they find themselves worse off.

I appreciate for more serious injuries when no long term prognosis has been offered by the treating physician it is challenging to value a claim, although I would assume the treating physician would be able to give an indication of the severity of the injury and the long term prognosis. Otherwise the claimant simply wait until they recover before accepting an offer.

I suspect a solicitor might be tempted to hazard a balk park figure if a potential claimant described their injuries as detailed by their physician and he thought he might be getting some work.

A non convential approach and not one without risks I conceed.

Crazy_Jamie

Parking_Trouble wrote: »

I thought there were some published guidelines on what you get.

I have an example of a LVI with 4 whiplash claimants
Payouts £1550, £2300, £2300, £1825 (early offers were made but surprisingly rejected)
Solicitors paid £975, £1620, £1720, £1140

Plus After the Event premiums averaging £375 each.

Medical reports £234 each, plus £1200 NHS bill.

Total loss of old banger £1395 - too expensive to repair scraped rear bumper. Credit Hire cost £3152. Over twice the cost of a replacement car.

Total in the region of £24k

That's why insurance premiums have rocketed.

There are a few things about this post that don't make sense to me, all stemming from your description of these incidents as 'LVI', by which I presume you mean Low Velocity Impact? If I am wrong about that then that's my mistake. If I'm correct, then the post really doesn't make sense, for the following reasons:

i) The costs are actually too low; an LVI case that runs to trial will result in legal costs far in excess of what you've quoted.
ii) A £1200 NHS bill would be highly unusual at best for an LVI case.
iii) Any accident that writes off a car is certainly not an LVI.
iv) If breach of duty was admitted (as it usually is in LVI cases), the Defendant likely should take a large chunk of the blame for the credit hire charges being that high, because the pre accident value of the vehicle should be paid quickly in those circumstances
v) In general terms, you cannot blame the Claimant if a Defendant takes an LVI argument to trial and loses. The fault there has to lie with the Defendant for the increased fees.

Clive_Woody wrote:

Merely a suggestion on how one could consider proceeding, which given the solicitors fees allows a margin of error of 25% on what could be achieved before they find themselves worse off.

I appreciate for more serious injuries when no long term prognosis has been offered by the treating physician it is challenging to value a claim, although I would assume the treating physician would be able to give an indication of the severity of the injury and the long term prognosis. Otherwise the claimant simply wait until they recover before accepting an offer.

I suspect a solicitor might be tempted to hazard a balk park figure if a potential claimant described their injuries as detailed by their physician and he thought he might be getting some work.

A non convential approach and not one without risks I conceed.

I do appreciate what you're saying, but I cannot stress enough how inadvisable that approach is. As I have previously stated, there are plenty of solicitors out there who are not charging any success fee at the moment, let alone at 25%. Taking the time to find one of those will be time better spent than trying to negotiate damages with no knowledge of how to value injuries.

Digb

Randy_Watson wrote: »

I was involved a car accident earlier this year and broke my leg. I was off work for eight weeks so was advised to make a personal injury claim.

I contacted a solicitor last week hoping for a 'no win, no fee' arrangement but was told I would have to give them 25% of my compensation if the claim was successful.

They said it was to do with the new laws and can't recover costs from the other persons insurance company.

Has this happened to anyone else recently?

Are there solicitors out there who will still take cases on a 'no win, no fee' basis? or is the 25% deduction commonplace now?

I am a solicitor and worked in America and England, in insurance work. The one third or so deduction is what happens in the states. The new reforms in the UK are intended to reduce costs to insurers by making the injured person pay the costs like in the US. It used to be that all the costs were paid by the insurer but the insurers complained to government that it was costing them too much so the governement set new rules which are pushing the cost onto the claimant, ie., you.

I worked inside an insurance company, one of the big ones here in the UK and realized there is a much more effective way of doing this so I am working to set up a new system which would be much cheaper. I have the web site set up and have the people ready to to do the work but lawyers have such a hold over insurance that it is difficult to fight them, even if you can save insurers and claimants a lot of time and money. Because I have been in law and insurance for 30 plus years I know this is all a big scam on insurers and claimants and the beneficiaries are lawyers who make, hold your hats...£14 billion a year in legal costs. While it is pushing insurers to the wall, try telling an insurer to use a different system that will get a result in a matter of days or weeks and will cost a fraction of the money. They don't care and they don't listen because they are getting a good salary and their highly paid lawyers are happy with the status quo thank you very much.

I have demonstrated my system to a claims manager at a Lloyds syndicate who immediately saw the benefit of it. If you want to know more about it I can steer you in the right direction and I won't take a penny from you.

So, yes this is the way things are going in the UK to allow insurers to save money and they are not being straight with you. There are other ways of getting compensation and they know it, as does the government, at a fraction of the time, cost and inconvenience. The government set up the Jackson Committee which recommended that litigation be dealt with the way I am suggesting but so far I seem to be the only one who is acting on it.

Quentin

Digb wrote: »

If you want to know more about it I can steer you in the right direction and I won't take a penny from you.......

Are you offering your services for nothing to get compensation for the OP?

All very strange!

Crazy_Jamie

Quentin wrote: »

Are you offering your services for nothing to get compensation for the OP?

All very strange!

I agree. An odd post all around. I'm eager to know more about this revolutionary system to dramatically reduce costs over and above the Jackson reforms. If it is as incredible as we're being made to believe I'm not sure why the poster seems reluctant to actually put the details in this thread.

Digb

The way things work at the moment is that you go to a solicitor, he notifies your claim to the insurer, negotiates, gets evidence together, like medical reports, loss of income details, reports on your future ability to work and if necessary goes through a court, which takes a huge amount of paper work and time, all costing money... The way the lawyer makes money is to tell you that the only way you can get a judge to decide the case for you is to go through a paper based court system which is clogged up with something like three or four hundred thousand cases being started every few months, so you have a huge delay and in the end you agree to a settlement because you are told that you might not get what you should get and it will take a long time to get it. So, you get a result which isn't based on anything other than a compromise.

What the Jackson Committee recommended a few years ago, among other things, was to use alternative dispute resolution services where you have judges who work privately overseeing the case and making a decision. All this only takes days, often doesn't even need a lawyer to tell you how to draft papers to file in court and costs a fraction of the money it costs to have solicitors and barristers take a case through court.

I had hundreds of cases a month coming through my legal team and we had to start legal proceedings on all of them if they didn't settle and the legal costs were often as much or more than the money in dispute, I had to draft up papers when everything was already in a digital form, send things through the post because courts are not yet using electronic media, send people to court, when they had comprehensive insurance and got no benefit from what we were doing for them. It was soul destroying and wasteful. I left the job a few years ago and have been working with a major software developer in California and the leading provider of mediation and arbitration services in the UK to develop an application which allows for the transfer of information and appointment of decision makers, getting rid of all the paper filing and allowing for a case to be finished within a matter of days, even hours, once the evidence is all gathered, with appeal procedures, codes of conduct, security of information, even so we cannot know what is happening in your case unless you want us to. This way you can draw on a lawyer's advice if you need to be assured that your case is being dealt with properly and he doesn't tell you how much you have to pay him to file papers and get a negotiated result which is just based on his idea of what is the right result. You have control of the system, access to the judge and it saves so much money that the insurer is happy to pay you more to save his own defence costs, which are as much as yours in most cases.

Digb

So, if someone comes here to try to raise interest in an idea, they get insulted.

Ok, I get it.

I would only post a link to my site if someone showed an interest, rather than just insulting me.

Quentin

You need to pay for your advertising elsewhere like all other businesses.

(Your link wouldn't be accepted anyway! MSE has ways to deter such cynical promotion)

Crazy_Jamie

Digb wrote: »

Insurance litigation is a gravy train which is crippling the insurance industry.

You say this, but last I checked insurance companies are actually doing very well indeed in terms of profits. To give a recent example, have a look at this article. Now admittedly it is an article by Thompsons Solicitors and needs to therefore be viewed in the context of the clear motive that is behind writing it, but the figures a third of the way down the page are factual. Whatever effect litigation is having on these companies, it is hardly 'crippling'. If anything the suggestion tends to be that consumers are missing out because insurance companies aren't passing these savings on.

I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at with your proposals. You seem to paint this picture of claims being resolved within days or hours once forms are filed and evidence is gathered, but efficient resolution of claims is the target of the system now. Judges make directions for the exchanging of evidence, and when that is gathered decisions are made. Apart from seemingly including technology to make things more efficient, I don't see what is radical about these proposals. What about the need for oral hearings to resolve matters by way of witness evidence? Disputes can rarely be solved on the papers. Your proposals seem to come at the problem from an arbitration approach on the premise that most cases ended in compromise anyway, but equally plenty do not. Your system just seems to be a form of arbitration or alternative dispute resolution, and not one that is necessarily applicable across the board to adversarial litigation.